WaterAid welcomes Ban Ki-moon’s call to eradicate poverty by 2030

News

WaterAid has today welcomed the Secretary General's report(1) on meeting the Millennium Development Goals and calls for a bold agenda to eradicate extreme poverty beyond 2015.

Margaret Batty, WaterAid UK Director of Policy and Campaigns stated:

“We stand at the cusp of a new generation that has the power and potential to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. The Secretary General, in this report, has challenged the international community to galvanise around this vision and agree to the concrete action required to make this a reality for all.

“The report is also a call to governments to keep to the promises made on the unfinished business of the existing Millennium Development Goals. The water target may well have been met, but this still leaves 1 in 10 people without safe water, and more than 1 in 3 without adequate sanitation.

“The burden of death and disease continues to fall hardest on the world’s poorest, who risk being left behind even further. 700,000 children under the age of five continue to die needlessly every year from a lack of access to water and sanitation – a situation that is untenable in the modern world. International leaders must now come together to bring about the transformative change that can be realised through everyone, everywhere having access to these basic but essential services by 2030.”

Currently, 2.5 billion people (more than 1 in 3 of the world’s population) live without access to adequate sanitation, while 768 million (around 1 in 10) go without access to safe drinking water(2).

The World Health Organisation has conservatively estimated that a lack of these services costs the global economy around $260 billion a year(3), in increased healthcare costs, time taken to access services and from a drop in productivity.

In March, WaterAid released its Everyone Everywhere report(4) that called for universal access to water and sanitation services by 2030. The forward of the report was written by Liberian President and African Union Ambassador for Water and Sanitation, Sirleaf Johnson.

Figures on global access to water and sanitation can be found from the WHO / UNICEF, Joint Monitoring Programme website here.

The World Health Organisation report, ‘Global costs and benefits of drinking-water supply and sanitation interventions to reach the MDG target and universal coverage’ can be downloaded here.

The WaterAid report, ‘Everyone, everywhere: A vision for water, sanitation and hygiene post-2015’ can be downloaded from here.

WaterAid's vision is of a world where everyone has access to safe water and sanitation. The international organisation works in 27 countries across Africa, Asia, Central America and the Pacific Region to transform lives by improving access to safe water, hygiene and sanitation in some of the world’s poorest communities. Since 1981, WaterAid has reached 19.2 million people with safe water and, since 2004, 15.1 million people with sanitation.